The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) is a UK-based charity that “seeks to transform the lives of poor and vulnerable children in developing countries.” Yesterday the foundation announced its first Transparency Policy, which requires its grantees and consultants to widely disseminate resources they create under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY). We…

Game Plan. By Rob Armes, CC BY 3.0 Today, the OER community releases the Foundations for OER Strategy Development. This document provides a concise analysis of where the global OER movement currently stands: what the common threads are, where the greatest opportunities and challenges lie, and how we can more effectively work together as a…

The Free Music Archive, a long-running Creative Commons music platform, is running its first-ever fundraising drive. It will run from mid-November until mid-December 2015, and is offering donors shirts and stickers at various pledge levels. The Free Music Archive has existed for many years and has provided millions of users with curated, ‘some rights reserved’…

The final text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was released earlier this month. The gigantic agreement contains sweeping provisions regarding environmental regulation, pharmaceutical procurement, intellectual property, labor standards, food safety, and many other things. If adopted, it would be the most significant expansion of international restrictions on copyright in over two decades. Over the last five years, the TPP…

It’s been a very frightening evening and a sombre morning. We are all worried for our friends around the world who are at risk. Last night we saw the attacks in Paris in Beirut, but we also know that this kind of violence is sometimes a daily reality in countries around the world not so…

Bassel Khartabil by Joi Ito, CC BY 2.0. Bassel Khartabil is the lead of Creative Commons Syria. He’s been has been imprisoned in Syria since March 15, 2012. Bassel has been a key contributor to projects that digitize, preserve, and share cultural heritage works. The #NEWPALMYRA project was launched last month, which is an online community…

Guest post by Fátima São Simão, CC Portugal Public Lead; Teresa Nobre, CC Portugal Legal Lead CC Toolkit for Business Handouts CC Toolkit for Business Posters CC Open Business Model Canvas At the 2013 CC Global Summit in Buenos Aires, Creative Commons launched the CC Toolkits Project, an initiative aimed at developing, collecting, and organizing…

    Yesterday, Creative Commons joined the U.S. Department of Education (ED) for a series of important announcements that will advance OER in grades PreK-12 across the United States. ED announced the launch of its #GoOpen campaign to encourage states, school districts and educators to use Open Educational Resources (OER). OER, made “open” by CC…

Yesterday the Obama administration released an updated version of its Open Government National Action Plan. Ever since the launch of the global Open Government Partnership in 2011, participating nations have made commitments to work on initiatives “to promote transparency, increase civic participation, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to make government more open, effective, and accountable.”…

Today marks the launch of #NEWPALMYRA, an online community platform and data repository dedicated to the capture, preservation, sharing, and creative reuse of data about the ancient city of Palmyra. The project features 3-D models of ruins from Palmyra created by Bassel Khartabil, the lead for Creative Commons Syria who has been imprisoned there since March…